This new form of special pleading – "I'm special and you hurt my feels" – is a constant from the far right whinge to the left. Nobody does quivering lips and big teary doe eyes like Andrew Bolt, unless it's every precious mungbean he distressed and affronted with his last outrage. But Bolt isn't a hater. He's just a well paid opportunist.

There would have been an almost delicious irony to watching Germaine Greer get skewered on the great harpoon of censorious indignation for her 'hateful' comments about transgendered individuals had the whole thing not been such a Don DeLillo-grade farce. Greer, whose career and fame was based on her forensic interrogation of gendered power imbalances seemed a little taken aback at the force of the reaction to her tin-eared candour about trannies - or at least about her 'feelings' about trannies. It all comes back to feelings, don't it Guvnor?

Greer might have been ill informed, even completely wrong about men who become women, but we'll never know because her feelpinions were never subject to the same sort of forensic interrogation she levelled on the patriarchy.

Advertisement

Rather than asking her to justify her statements with data and reasoned argument, the protesters who wanted her banned from speaking on their campus just … well they just wanted her banned because she hurt their feels.

Because she was a hater.

And she if wasn't hater, she was giving aid and comfort to haters.

Which is just as bad being a hater.

Yesterday it was Zoolander's turn. Or Benedict Cumberbatch's. Or whoever decided to cast Sherlock as a gender fluid supermodel named 'All' (which is a much better joke than I would normally give Ben Stiller credit for). But sadly it's 'hateful' according to a petition demanding a boycott of the film for "enforcing dangerous perceptions of the queer community".

Lest you think the reflexive fear of the H-bomb is mostly a left thing, rest assured the Right feels every bit as unjustly hated and is just as wounded and just as much in need of a great big kiss-a-boo-boo on its hurty-wah-wahs as anyone.

Here's a suggestion. All of you, grow the hell up, strap on a jet pack and get over it. Just because somebody disagrees with you and thinks you're wrong, possibly even an idiot and unmitigated dick, it doesn't mean they hate you and are looking to exterminate you and all of your kind.

Hate is a very dark and particular toxin and when it burns in a great mass of human beings there are few things more frightening to behold. That's why we should really save it as a word for describing those rare occasions when it is truly loosed upon the world. When you see hate, real hate, it will chill your soul.